Unreleased NES Racing Game Restored After 30 Years From 21 Flops

The Video Game History Foundation has secured an unreleased NES racing game from Anteater creator Chris Oberth. The game, which is based on the movie Days of Thunder, was backed up by several HDD partitions spread across 21 different floppy disks.

The game was created by, among others, programmer and designer Chris Oberth, who passed away in 2012. He has worked on the arcade game Anteater, among other things. Oberth also worked for years on various games for the Apple II. In early 2020, the Video Game History Foundation was approached by a relative of Oberth. The family had “stacks” of old computers, CD-ROMs, floppy diskettes, cassettes, notes, and data tapes dating back to the late 1970s, when Oberth was still working on his Apple II games.

While sifting through the archives, the foundation came across a single floppy disk labeled “NINTENDO: HOT ROD TAXI, FINAL.” The floppy contained only one playable, but very early proof-of-concept of a racing game set in a city. The game in question turned out to be based on Days of Thunder, a film from the 1990s in which Tom Cruise plays, among others. The existence of this prototype was enough for the archivists to look for other discs containing game files for an NES.

The proof-of-concept of the game and the 21 floppy disks on which the game was found. Images via the Video Game History Foundation

Soon the team came across a collection of 21 old 5.25″ floppies labeled “PCTools 5.10 Backup”. These drives collectively contained backups from four different HDD partitions. All 21 floppies were readable and the team found a directory of hints to a Days of Thunder game. The archivists decided to use an old computer to run PCTools, thus copying the data from the system. The team did not find a playable ROM, but did find the source code of the racing game, along with game data and the assembler that turned the source code into an executable program.

Rich Whitehouse explains in his blog post for the VGHF that some important files were found elsewhere in Oberth’s backups, including some tiles needed to render the game’s graphics. Finding some of these missing files proved tricky. “I extracted every archive in every known format from the backup and did the same for every other disk image we managed to recover.” The entire backup was searched again, after which Whitehouse came across a single 128kB binary file. This file would be a possible match for the game.

Whitehouse says the VGHF was cautious about trying the data, as the team wasn’t sure if it actually belonged to the game files. In the end, Whitehouse tried the file anyway, as the team “see no other options.” The team built a rom with the assembler and everything turned out to work. “Finally, the long-gone Days of Thunder can be seen for the first time in more than thirty years,” writes the VGHF.

It seems that ‘a lot’ of source data is still missing. “I suspect this data was on a HDD partition that was not included in the backup,” Whitehouse writes. Nevertheless, the game is fully playable. Without that single binary from a seemingly unrelated dataset, the VGHF may have “never been able to recover this game in its entirety,” in its own words.

The Video Game History Foundation says it has obtained permission from Oberth’s family to publish the game’s source code. The game will therefore appear on GitHub in the short term, the VGHF writes. At the time of writing, this is not yet the case. However, a limited NES cartridge of the game has already been made, the proceeds of which will be donated to Oberth’s widow. The cartridge is said to be for sale at This Room is an Illusion, but the product page no longer appears to be online.

Gameplay of the Days of Thunder game for the NES